Season Summaries

Dragon Ball is a Japanese series of anime, whose original author is Akira Toriyama. This mangaka is also known for being the author of another famous series: Dr. Slump, which is a series that in my opinion is brilliant and unique for its dumb humour. Dragon Ball first appeared as a comic, called "manga" in Japan. This manga was published weekly in Shounen Jump magazine. It is important to keep in mind that this magazine has a weekly circulation of 6-7 million (American magazines like Time or People have 4,3 and 3,4 million each.) It had an enormous success and inmediately it was adapted as a TV series..

Dragon Ball is the first of the three parts which (until now) make up the anime series with the greatest number of fans in Catalonia., one of the most famous anime series in the world and also in his mother country, Japan.

This is the story of a little boy called Son Gokou. This story is based on a chinese legend, the king ape legend. In the beggining, Son Goku lives happily in the mountains, far from the world since his grandfather's death. He is a very naive boy who has a physical peculiarity: he has a tail. And a day, all his life changes: a girl called Bulma arrives, she is searching a thing owned by Gokou: A dragon ball. After discussing a little, Gokou decides to go with Bulma in search of the other dragon balls. There are seven dragon balls, and each one has a certain number of stars in it. When these balls are all together, they have the power to call a mighty dragon, the Dragon Shenron, who can bring into reality any wish of the caller.

As the episodes go on, some new, unearthly techniques and attacks appear. These attacks are based on different kinds of energy balls which explode like bombs. Son Gokou's most famous attack is the Kamehameha. Gokou learned this attack from his master, the great Mutenroshi, best known under the name of Kame Sennin, one of my favourite characters.

And that is how this great story beggins. The story has lots of humoristic situations, as well as action, and we can follow Gokou's life. We can see how his strength and his skills grow and how he overcomes the obstacles he finds during his search for the seven dragon balls. Now, I will not make a summary of the series because it would not occupy only a page, but many.

One of the most interesting quality of the series is that the characters keep growing, and don't have always the same age. This doesn't happen in the Western series and comics as Superman or the Ninja Turtles. The characters grow, die, new characters are born, and there are marriages as well.

I only would like to say that it is worth to see the series and to read the manga, because Dragon Ball is one of theses series which marks a generation, as Heidi, Marco and Mazinger Z marked the last generation



Dragon Ball Z is the second part of this popular series. This part is the one which was the cause of the boom of its popularity, which increased astronomically. For example, the first part saw three films based on its argument... Well, Dragon Ball Z has been the base to 15 films !! This fact alone enables to see the enormous popularity of Dragon Ball. We can find manga, special colored manga based on the films, lots of CD's, an illimited number of card collections, videogames for Nintendo, Super Nintendo, Megadrive, Playstation, Saturn and Nintendo 64, posters, figures, key rings, candies, pens, and so on, all based on Dragon Ball Z. There is also a 7 volume encyclopedia where all kinds of information about Dragon Ball Z can be found. The manga has been translated into lots of languages, as the Chinese, Korean, Catalan, Italian, Spanish, French, Malay, etc... This is for the manga, but I cannot imagine into how many languages has been translated the anime series...

Why this series has achieved such an incredible popularity? Dragon Ball Z keeps telling the adventures of Son Gokou and his friends, but the humour that we could find in the first part disappears now. There is much more action, there are lots and lots of energy attacks, and a fight is not a fight without them. In Dragon Ball Z appear for the first time the saiyajin, a mythical alien race. Here we discover that Gokou is a member of this race (he didn't know it, and now we can understand why he has a tail and why he transforms into a big monkey during full moon nights).

Besides, in Dragon Ball Z the family grows because some characters have children, like Son Gokou, who has two sons with Chichi (Son Gohan and Son Goten) and Vejita, who has a son with Bulma, named Trunks.

As the series goes on, Goku keeps winning more and more enemies, which are more and more strong, and he himself gets more and more strength. An example: At the end of Dragon Ball, Gokou is the strongest person in the Earth. Well, in Dragon Ball Z some extraterrestrial characters come into action, at first the saiyajin Vejita and Nappa, after that, the strongest being in the universe, Freezer. When Gokou wins Freezer (and then Gokou is the most powerful in the universe) two androids created with the purpose of killing him come, and then a bioandroid even strongest, Cell, comes into action. Then, when Cell finally dies, Buu, a creation of an evil wizard, arrives. Of course, there is no plot left, it consists only in a repetition of the same. But DBZ has the quality of keeping us hooked on it by its action and fantasy.

It was precisely this fact, the evident poorness of the plot and the dificulty in finding an exit to this repetition of "now he wins the bad boy and then an even stronger one comes" what made Akira Toriyama take the decision of leaving the drawing of the series to make other things, other series that, I am sure of it, will also have a great quality.

Perhaps one of the things which draw more attention is the appearance of the supersaiyajin. The supersaiyajin are saiyajin with have achieved such an state, during which their strength increases incredibly, their hair turns into blonde ans sharpens and their eyes turn into blue. During the series, Gokou and the other saiyajin after him achieve level 1, then level 2 (during which the hair gets even sharper) and level 3 (which only Gokou achieves and during which the hair is still blonde but very long).

During the last part of the series the fusions enter into action. The fusions, as its name indicates clearly, consist on a fusion between two saiyajin of an equivalent power level. This was made in answer to Buu, a monster so strong that noBODY could beat him. The solution was to join two characters into one and then their force would double. The first ones who used this technique were Trunks, Bulma and Vejita's son, and Son Goten, Gokou and Chich's son. These two form Gotenks. After that, Goku and Vejita fusion, creating a character whose Japanese name is Vejito, but whose Catalan name may be Vegeku (in the manga), Gogeta (in the TV series) or Vegerot (also in the manga.)

To finish with, I would like to recommend this series to anyBODY, but I personally prefer the first part, because of its better plot, and its incledible sense of humour. Well, Dragon Ball Z is a shameless repetition of the same situations. The first half is not so unimaginative made, but the second half insists always in the same awful and boring situations of fights during 30 episodes or more...



Dragon Ball GT is the third and, until now, it is also the last part of Dragon Ball. This series resumes the narration of the adventures of Son Gokou and his friends, though its "father", Akira Toriyama, does not participate in its creation. This was because the last part of Dragon Ball Z had had a so unimaginative plot, with long fights, little action and less humour, and due to these facts Akira Toriyama decided to finish the saga that made him famous throughout the world.

Despite this, Toei Animation (the corporation which produces Dragon Ball GT) decided, with Toriyama's permission, to continue the series, because it is an incredible source of money, not only for its television success, but also for its production of merchandising. To make it possible, they formed a group of professionals, formed mainly by people who had worked under Toriyama's direction in Dragon Ball Z.

It is important to say that Dragon Ball GT exists only under animation form. As the rest of the series was based on the manga which Akira Toriyama kept publishing in Shounen Jump magazine, Dragon Ball GT has been created directly in anime form.

After a long wait, Manga Video has edited the DBGT episodes in video, and thus in Spain we have been able to watch them. In spite of that, a long time before being able to watch a single image of DBGT in TV, a curious phenomenon happened: the series was successful even before being edited in video. There are Dragon Ball GT card collections, stickers, figures, posters, puzzles, watches, etc and there are even magazines in which we can find summaries of the episodes for knowing what is happening even without watching them on TV

The action of the series begans when the dearly loved enemy Pilaf manages to gather the seven dragon balls and calls the dragon Shenron to ask him for (what a surprise) the total control of the world. But when he is nearly to get his wish Gokou arrives, ready to prevent him from doing it for the second time (the first time was in Dragon Ball) and Pilaf, full of rage, mutters: "I wish you were again a child, Gokou, then I might have chances to destroy you" and the dragon, attentive, gives him what he wants: GOKOU IS AGAIN A LITTLE BOY.

As it is necessary to wait a full year to be able to gather again the balls, Gokou, Trunks, Pan (Son Gohan's daughter, then Son Gokou's granddaughter) and a little robot whose name is Giru decide to begin a voyage throughout the universe to search the seven "black starred" dragon balls, which are spread there. And that is precisely the origin of the GT initials in the title, which mean "Grand Tour".

Dragon Ball GT had a very successful start, with an attractive plot, lots of sympathy, humour and action. I also think that the action is more rapid than in the last half of DBZ, and that is a problem which the authors have managed to solve. Despite all this, it seems that in the last episodes the ideas began to disappear and they fell in the trap of long fights and little real action. Dragon Ball GT finished in 1997 in Japan. And that was the end of one of the series which have marked the childhood and teenage years of thousands of people throughout the world.

However, it seems that DBGT is a very entertaning and good series. When Akira Toriyama saw the first GT episodes declared that if he had had the idea of continuing the series that way, he would never have left it. But the fact that Toriyama has left the series doesn't mean that he is workless, because it seems that he is preparing a new series that I am sure it will be just as good as Dragon Ball or Dr.Slump. For the moment, he has published some short stories in Shounen Jump magazine: "Alien X Peke", "Tokimecha", "Majin Mura no Bubul", "Cowa!" and "Kajika".